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The most notable of those roles may have been as the Kennedy patriarch, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, in a 1990 ABC miniseries, “The Kennedys of Massachusetts.” The TV miniseries, which chronicled the lives and loves of the Kennedys over several decades, earned Durning a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor, his only Golden Globe.

Durning also was one of the stars of a short-lived TV series called “First Monday” about the U.S. Supreme Court. Cast alongside Joe Mantegna and James Garner, he played a hard-line conservative justice who sometimes spoke in limericks. The highly touted CBS series debuted in January 2002 but vanished before summer.

Among Durning’s movie credits was a notable one as president of the United States; he played President David T. Stevens in “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” a 1977 political thriller from director Robert Aldrich. Burt Lancaster starred as a renegade general who takes over a missile silo in Montana to blackmail the president into revealing the truth about the Vietnam War.

Durning has 110 movie credits listed by the Internet Movie Database and an additional 94 on television. Among the other movie roles are a variety of elected officials: governors in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and “O Brother, Where Are Thou?” (2000), a U.S. senator in “The Final Countdown” (1980), a mayor in “State and Main” (2000), and a congressman in “Naked Run” (2011).

His performance in “Best Little Whorehouse” brought him one of his two Academy Award nominations for supporting actor, along with the one for his role as a Nazi colonel in occupied Poland in Mel Brooks’s remake of “To Be or Not to Be” (1983). He did not win either time.

His TV roles included a variety of authority figures, including Pope John XXIII in a 1987 TV movie and Russell Oswald, chief of New York’s prison system, in the TV movie “Attica” (1980).

Durning, a combat veteran of World War II, died of natural causes, The Associated Press reported. His other acting credits included roles in “The Sting,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Tootsie,” “Dick Tracy,” “North Dallas Forty,” and the TV series “Evening Shade.” He also played Santa Claus multiple times.